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Comment by wcummings | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call it a "Linux Desktop" if you can't run a standard SSH client. Chrome OS is it's own beast.

I've got this crazy idea. Since "Linux Desktops" are generally running GNU under the hood for providing user land services, why don't we call those systems... I don't know... "GNU/Linux"? That way we can distinguish them from systems that use the Linux kernel, but have a completely different user land infrastructure.

I know, I know. It's crazy talk....

The chance of success would be higher if the term GLX would be used: Debian GLX, Ubuntu GLX, etc.

How many of them actually intimately use the GNU userland as opposed to Xorg and whatever libc's installed? GNU's an increasingly irrelevant portion of unix and unixlike systems -- most of the actually important userland portions are python, ruby, the aforementioned Xorg, etc.

> GNU's an increasingly irrelevant portion of Unix

Say what? Do you know what GNU means or what it includes? Here's a link so you can learn more:

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html

Yes, I know what it means and includes. Android, which is one of the biggest unixes right now, doesn't use GNU. iOS, which is another one of the biggest unixes right now, doesn't use GNU. Most embedded linuxes don't use GNU. So yes, for the parts of unix which are visible to most people, the gnu parts are not very relevant at all.

But they are for the "Linux Desktop", hence the joke.

While this is true, there is still a unix-like userland typically, at least in the form of busybox or somesuch..

I think there is some value in denoting 'linux the kernel' from 'linux the unix-like system', especially in the face of those systems which mainly use 'linux the kernel' in a non unix-like way, such as here..

e.g.: the 'gnu parts' (e.g. unix-style userland) are hugely important for me in a workstation - I could not do work in a system that doesn't provide the 'gnu(unix) like' user interface. On a phone/consumer/browser device, this is not so much the case

A device using the linux kernel (or Mach kernel in iOS) doesn't make it a "Unix" or "Unix-like" system, despite that same kernel being used in other truly Unix-like systems. The user land (aka GNU in most Linux distros) is what makes it a Unix-like system. That doesn't mean GNU isn't relevant, it means what you considered a "Unix-like" system was overly broad.

This reply is a bit overly pedantic and I apologize, but you kept pushing so I wanted to clarify.

I actually don't think you are incorrect. GNU is not nearly as big a piece of the puzzle as it used to be. It's just that when most people say "Linux Desktop", the part where they say "Linux" usually means the part that GNU makes up. As far as I know, GNU libc is still by far and away the most popular libc installed on those kinds of systems.

So it was just kind of a snarky joke because the parent said that to be a "Linux Desktop" you had to be able to get ssh running (presumably they meant openssh). And while that's not GNU, GNU is what the vast majority of "Linux Desktops" will use to get you there -- so the implication really was that "Linux Desktop" == "GNU/Linux Desktop".

I thought it was funny, but probably I was being too obscure. Also, I should know better than to dive into politics for no good reason.

GNU is more than a collection of programs; it's an operating system:

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

In some ways, and if everything aligns, ChromeOS is actually better:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/chromium-hter...

But "if everything aligns" == "only if you're inside Google".

Hah, that's a funny thread. I've heard that Google is using Chromebooks for engineers with production access.

Makes a lot of sense sense since Chrome OS is much easier to secure than a normal Linux distribution.

That sounds insane. Do you have any proof ?

Google also has goobuntu, which I'm being is what's provided to engineers.

Niels Provos himself is a Chromebook user (not sure if he needs to access production these days...) and he talks about locking down privileged access to Chromebooks with security keys:

https://mikecborg.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/securing-clouds/ (search for all occurrences of 'chromebook')

https://youtu.be/O-JXFQezWOc?t=35m0s

You can choose what kind of laptop you want. ChromeOS is one of the options, and security (+ trivial exchange-ability) is one of the selling points for using a Chromebook.

I tried it for a while, but I'm too used to the Mac to have made the switch more easily, so I moved back. But I know quite a few folks who use and love them. Opinions, as I'm sure you can guess, vary widely. It was surprisingly not-bad, even for a diehard mac user, and that was on a model from two years ago.

I wonder about that. Can you use a mac laptop to write software for the Google infrastructure ?

That seems unlikely, if only for the security implications (would apply to any laptop of course, nothing to do with macos or chromeos)

Yes. Remember, there's not really "the Google infrastructure" as some separate component. With a few exceptions, it's all One Big Repository (https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor... ).

Google is a very large engineering organization, and (my opinion here, but one shared by others) recognizes that there's a lot of diversity in what engineers like for their workflow. There's obviously a set of standards for what you can choose from as far as laptops (since the company is buying them), but it's pretty broad.

Here's a Quora answer that goes into more detail: https://www.quora.com/What-computer-or-laptop-do-software-en...

You can read more about Google's security model in a USENIX ;login article from last year: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

(source: The above cited sources, plus I'm part-time at Google.)

Agreed, the SSH client is a bit of an outlier since you have that natively.

I still listed it for completeness, I do use it, after all.

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